The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
In today's cloud computing environment, virtual machines, platform services, and software services are often shared and used by multiple users as well as other cloud systems. It is sometimes difficult to determine what impact will occur to other users and systems when an action is taken on a computing resource (hardware or software) in the cloud computing environment, such as a server reboot or an application shutdown.